One Serie Mundial Note
I am numb and probably won't add anything new to the gazillion words written today about the Series. So, I will instead leave you with my favorite moment(s) of watching the playoffs here in Venezuela.
Whenever a batter went yard, the ESPN Deportes play-by-play guy would scream this hilarious home run call. Practice it, yourself. It takes about 10 seconds to deliver.
"A lo profundooooooooo ... ¡Nononononononononononoooooooooooooooooo! ¡Dígale que no a esa pelota!
Okay, then, I will. Te digo no, pelota.
Sox 2004. Holy shit.
posted by Ian at
3:49 PM
1 Comments:
I got to "watch" most of the clinching game on mlb.com gamecast with my sister giving me her own little play by play over instant message. I talk to her once a month or so, so just being able to chat with her made it memorable. When the game was over, I just kind of sat there at my desk, numb, as she announced she was "goin' outside to join the paa-ty."
Last year Saito-sensei taunted me with "Sayonara [homerun]! Shuuryou jyan!(It's over!)" as we watched the Sox season end via webcast together during our lunch break. I lost a struggle to control my emotions, and snapped the pen I was holding in my hand. Ultimately, quivering in the throes of some feeling that mixed homesickness, despair, and disgust, I launched one of my shoes out the open window of the shokuinshitsu. Call it an ironic reaction to all the little routines that I deal with every day in a Japanese office (starting with changing my shoes as I walk from the entryway into the building proper).
Though back in Gbury, you wouldn't even have called me a Red Sox fan, over the last few years, the Sox have come to symbolize something about back home in CT to me. Maybe it was the influence of my roomies back at Gtown- the New Yorkers and I loved to quarrel and the New England guys I lived with pulled a Bush-like "you're either with us, or you're against us" routine, but I've spent the last few years pulling for the Sox and the Pats. Anyway, I think in terms of the Sox, the idea of perpetual dashed hopes fits my image of settling down in Glastonbury or something.
Yet this year they had pulled of a "dai-gyakuten" big comeback. The Sox were, in the words of my co-workers "sugoi ne, arienai" (great and unbelievable), the same way they would describe the recent string of typhoons, or the earthquakes in Niigata. The detachment I felt from their empty astonishment, was equal to the distance I felt from the "paa-ty" that Susie had run out to join when the sox won. Detachment is commonplace feeling over here in the Matsui-nation. I am a "gaikokujin" (foreigner) or rather "gaijin" (outsider). I'm used to it, and with the execption, it seems, of big games involving the sox, there aren't many times when I would rather be anywhere else than here. So when Foulke flipped the ball to first for the last out, I just sat there at my desk in quiet joy, basking in a wave of nostalgia and homesickness. A few minutes later one of my coworkers wandered over to ask why I had two fists thrust in the air, and if I was ok.
There was no one to share those feelings with, here amongst the unconcerned, or at home among the revelling. It was a precious moment that I have spent the last few days thinking about, unable to impress it on my girlfriend or Japanese friends, and unable to express to my parents or friends across the pond.
You're just starting this year in Venezuela. Unlike me, you've got someone with you to share all those moments and feelings that we can never really explain, or express in writing because we don't have the right words to make someone else understand. I think being with Brooke will be so invaluable in being able to express what is going on in your life in this forum. You won't have to just rely on your own memories. It gets harder, you know, the deeper you get into the culture and the language. Then again, I don't get what most people would call cable over here.
Sorry for the long post. Just reading your blog and sharing the experience of the 2004 Sox opened up a conduit for me to write in English (mostly--it's been hard, and I've had to go back and fix my r's and l's arr oval this wrong post) for the first time in a long time. I'm looking forward to sharing the journey with you.
Jbo
Having read my post, I feel like... nantonaku keshita hou ga iinjya nai no bimyou na kanji ga suru keredo ii ka naa yameyou... but how the hell do you express that in English? It looks weird enough in romaji.
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